It may sound (and look) like something from a sci fi movie, but it’s a real place. In the middle of the desert, beneath a glass dome, are wetlands, savannah grasslands, a rainforest, fog desert and an ocean with a coral reef. Constructed between 1987 and 1991 in Oracle Arizona, Biosphere 2 remains the largest…

In the archives of a small museum in the middle of nowhere, there are piles and piles of letters from remorseful senders dating as far back as 1938. These letters were accompanied in the mail by returned pieces of petrified wood, stolen from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Believing they are cursed and condemned by the karma of ancient…

I‘ve been discovering the Karoo through oil paintings on canvas today. The Karoo is a bit like South Africa’s answer to the Mojave. Both became deserts at the end of the last ice age, and from the looks of it, both make great road trips. What I wouldn’t do to be in the passenger seat of…

Exactly 90 years ago, a group of young friends took a road trip to Death Valley in 1926. The photo album, with detailed captions, a written record in the form of diary entries, ended up in the California archives for me to find all these years later. The identity of the diarist and the photographer are unknown. But…

When NASA tests habitation on Mars, they do it at a station in the Mojave Desert. This is a landscape that was chosen to be most representative of another planet and it’s also where Andrea Zettler, American sculptor, installation artist, and investigator of social practice, set up her sci-fi campsite. Lead Image (c) Rich Combs One of Andrea’s…

On my first California road trip a few years ago, one of our stops I was looking forward to the most was Death Valley’s mysterious Scotty’s Castle, a sprawling Spanish style manor built in the middle of nowhere in the roaring twenties. We were dangerously low on gas but determined to find this isolated oasis, and to my…

If someone had told me I could go kayaking in Death Valley as we drove through that barren desert one summer; the merciless August sun beating down on the tarmac ahead, I would have assumed they were starting to see a mirage. Boating in the desert?Strange things can happen in such an otherworldly place… Today this National…

Motorcar racing has taken place at the Bonneville salt flats in Utah since 1914, but for three years between 1953 and 1955, one die-hard fan attended the races to capture the surreal scenes like never before– in brilliant Kodachrome colour. Don Palmer only published a few of the photos and most of his snaps have sat…

In the heart of the Egyptian Sinai desert, concrete carcasses are rising from the sand. Sultan’s Palace, Pharoah’s Resort, Coral Beach; these are the dreamt up names given to the abandoned hotels by the German duo of photographers that captured them in their unfinished limbo, Stefanie Zoche and the late Sabine Haubitz. I’m new to the…

These must be photoshopped, I thought, when I first laid my eyes on the waves of silky sand and perfect patterns of turquoise blue. Turns out, you should never underestimate the beauty planet Earth is capable of. (c) Sylvain Bourdos No mirage in the desert, this is the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeast Brazil, a…